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Afghan Warlords Squeeze Profits From the War on Drugs, Critics Say

On entry to this town, beside a sprawling concrete-walled mosque, stood what was probably the world's largest openly declared market for raw opium and heroin.

From the mid-1990's, Ghanikhel's bazaar was the base for hundreds of merchants working from shops enclosed in a mud-walled maze, protected by a battalion of armed guards. The Taliban lashed and even executed Afghan drug users, but hundreds of tons of opium, and thousands of pounds of its derivative, heroin, were smuggled over donkey trails leading from here into Pakistan, and on to the West.

The Taliban banned poppy growing under American pressure two summers ago, in an effort to win an easing of stifling economic sanctions that had been imposed because of its harboring of Osama bin Laden. But Ghanikhel kept on trading, and while its supplies dwindled, its prices shot up.

But at the end of April, Ghanikhel's status as the company town came to an end. One dawn, trucks of soldiers sent by an American-backed warlord an hour's drive away, in Jalalabad, raided the market, seizing three truckloads of opium, heroin and bundled cash, and tons of the chemical acetic anhydride that is needed to refine opium into heroin.

The American-backed interim government in Kabul portrayed the raid as evidence of its earnestness in ridding the country of evils of its past. It was also a bold response to an ultimatum from the United States, Britain and other coalition partners that the interim government, under Hamid Karzai, had to cut off the drug trade to start the flow of $4.5 billion in reconstruction and development aid pledged by donor nations in January.

''America and the rest of the international community told us flatly, 'Either you do this, or we won't give you the help that was promised at Tokyo,' '' said Hajji Adbul Qadir, the warlord who sent his son, Zahir, to Ghanikhel to direct the raid, and in the process to bring the hoard of drugs and cash back to a strongroom at the 18th-century palace.

''We knew what we had to do,'' he said, ''and now it's up to America and the rest of the world to keep their promises to us.''

But people who monitor the drug eradication program -- poppy farmers, relief officials, and even officers in the militias of various warlords -- cast doubt on how successful the interim government has been, both here and across four eastern provinces. These critics say the crackdown, now a few weeks old, is showing many of the hallmarks of the wider ills besetting Afghanistan. Warlords, these people say, have hijacked the program and turned it into a way of gouging cash for use in recruiting new followers, paying soldiers and acquiring weapons. Many of the crops the warlords claim to have destroyed continue to yield opium gum, and farmers mill about every day at the warlords' gates complaining that they have been denied the money that is their due.

Before Mr. Karzai began the crackdown, poppy growers in this region and in the province of Helmand, in the southwest, seemed to be on their way to producing an opium crop of about 1.9 million tons, as predicted by the United Nations Drug Control Program. If the crackdown succeeds, even in part, tons of heroin might never reach the streets of Europe, where 90 percent of Afghan production has usually gone.

After the Taliban's collapse, drug barons in Pakistan and Afghanistan hoped to restore Afghanistan to the position it held in the late 1990's as the world's largest single-country source of raw opium, with a crop of about 5,000 tons in 1999. That figure dwarfed other countries and regions, including Colombia and the Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia, which produce much of the heroin sent to United States.

Several times a week, American or British military helicopters land at the Jalalabad airport with strongboxes carrying cash for the drug eradication program. Afghan officials say that Britain, the United States and the World Bank have so far provided $80 million to Mr. Karzai's government for the poppy farmers.

The cash is then supposed to be distributed to the farmers at the rate of about $700 per acre for every poppy crop destroyed -- about a tenth of what they might have earned from raw opium, but substantially more than they would have received from wheat.

But monitors of the program say that much of that $80 million has been siphoned off by the warlords and local tribal chiefs, or maliks, who rule the hinterland under the warlords' protection. One reason this is possible is that warlords, and Afghan relief officials under their domination, have been left in control of the eradication program. The United Nations drug control agency, after years of experience in Afghanistan, has been frozen out of the operation.

Critics say the warlords fabricate reports of the crops destroyed, so that some fields are left intact, or only partly eradicated. Entire districts, including several in the Jalalabad area that produce some the richest opium in the country, go untouched, with farmers and sharecroppers working from dawn to dusk, scoring poppy capsules with razor-edged scrapers that cause the opium gum to flow.

These critics say the eradication program has become a crucial source of income for the warlords as they build their power bases ahead of a loya jirga, or grand tribal council, that is to convene in early June to choose a provisional government to succeed the Karzai administration and lead Afghanistan to elections in mid-2004. This means that the warlords have a strong interest in seeing that the eradication program remains a job only partly done.

While the three warlords who confront each other in Jalalabad have all nominally backed the eradication program, there are many signs that it has become another arena for the maneuver, deceit and double cross that are endemic wherever Afghan warlords compete.

The bitterness of the rivalry in this strategically crucial region of eastern Afghanistan -- astride the main trade route linking the Afghan heartland to Pakistan -- was thrown into relief when a powerful bomb exploded in a central Jalalabad square in April just as two of the warlords, Mr. Qadir and Hazrat Ali, were driving into the square with Mr. Karzai's defense minister, Muhammad Fahim, on his first visit to Jalalabad since the Taliban collapsed.

The bomb, hidden in a construction crew's generator, narrowly missed the vehicle carrying the three men, but killed 27 bystanders and injured more than 60 others.

Initial reports suggested that the bomb might have been set by drug barons. But the talk now is that the bombing grew out of tangled local politics. Aides to Mr. Qadir handed out photographs showing the third warlord, Hajji Zaman, peering from a nearby corner at the bloodied bodies only moments after the blast.

Mr. Zaman's aides say it was his job to protect General Fahim, and that was why he stationed himself in Talashi Square. But Mr. Qadir, in an interview in the royal palace, strongly hinted that he suspects Mr. Zaman in the bombing. Asked if he thought it significant that Mr. Zaman was close at hand when a bomb nearly killed his two principal rivals, Mr. Qadir laughed and said, ''A lot of people are asking that question, and I'm asking myself the same question.''

After the raid that put the Ghanikhel opium market out of commission, Mr. Zaman's loyalists, who nominally control the area, began challenging accounts of the raid. They said that Mr. Qadir's claim that the raid netted 4,400 pounds of raw opium, 550 pounds of heroin and 8,800 pounds of heroin-producing chemicals hugely understated the amounts actually taken. Mr. Qadir has indignantly denied the implication that he acted to hoard the drugs himself.

On a tour of the empty Ghanikhel Market the day after the raid, local police officials loyal to Mr. Zaman said Mr. Qadir's men had filled a large truck and two pickups with bundles of opium and heroin. The men took away at least 44,000 pounds, the district police chief, Muhammad Nassem, estimated. ''They left nothing,'' he said.

Outside Ghanikhel were miles of undisturbed poppy fields, their pink and white flowers already shed in a sign that the crops had reached harvesting time, their opium capsules swollen to the size of tennis balls.

Mr. Qadir, the governor, was frank in expressing his anger at the United States and Britain for pressing the poppy eradication program at a politically sensitive time when the Karzai government is mobilizing for the national council in June. There is also the worry, others say, that popular opinion in poppy growing areas could swing back toward the Taliban.

In the poppy fields around Ghanikhel, farmers out tapping the poppy capsules for gum were equally indignant, saying that for crops already planted the West should offer compensation much closer to the sums the farmers would earn from selling the opium gum.

''We don't do this because we like it, we know it is wrong, but we are poor,'' said a farmer who gave his name as Jameel.

Holding a patty of freshly tapped opium gum in his hand, wrapped in the poppy plant's leaves and tied with twine, the 33-year-old farmer said he had expected an income of $5,000 from his poppy fields, but would get less than $1,000 if the fields were destroyed under the compensation scheme. But he owed more than 70,000 Pakistani rupees -- $1,160 -- to a local drug baron, he said, and faced ruin and punishment if he could not repay.

''When the Taliban fell, we were happy, because they took away our freedom, they forced us to go to the mosques, they made us grow long beards,'' he said. ''But now we are not happy, because the governments that control Karzai, the American and the British, are cruel. They freed us from one evil, and now they have delivered us into another one.''